Hello Peter,
I know this is awhile ago, but in case you read this, maybe it will give you some peace of mind.
I knew David Berrigan's sister, Kate. I met David a few times, about the same time you knew him, when he was in school at Reed. We wrote letters to each other after that. David and Kate were my age, and their mother's family lived in my home town in New Mexico.
David's father would have been proud of him, I am certain. David Berrigan went on to further study in the sciences. He earned a PhD in biology and a Master's in Public Health. He works in research, with the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He has two sons, I think. I have not corresponded with David or Kate in many years. They lived with their mother in northernmost California, but you knew that.
David Berrigan is currently director of the Applied Research Program, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, if you wish to contact him. That's somewhere on the east coast, I'm not certain which state or city.

I’ve played Irish music and written poetry for most of my life, but have generally kept these two worlds separate. A major exception to this practice took place at St. Mark’s Church in lower Manhattan on November 10, 1982, when an Irish-American night at the Poetry Project (organized by my frie...

Ezra Abrams,
I've seen you around, here and in the WSJ online community. You seem like a no-nonsense and sincere sort, NOT a cynical New Yorker!
We young ones over on Google+ and Seeking Alpha formerly referred to Professor DeLong as an economist-warrior, a mensch, if you will. His blog comments were teeming with lively chatter and debate, from various economists, economics dilettantes, ultra-liberals from CrookedTimber, physics professors from Princeton and unemployed widows like myself. Where are they now? There was a sharp drop-off when Summers-fest began. At the moment, I see none at all, only Ezra Abrams, pointing out what should be (must be?) evident to eminent economists of all stripes.

This is certainly good for AMZN and Jeff Bezos. I don't think it is good for the citizenry for one company, with majority shares held by one individual, to be the disruptor and newly reigning leader of let's see, how many industries?
1. Publishing
2 Retail
3. Enterprise computing via the cloud
4. The news media
Publishing, retail, business computing and news, all together. I wouldn't want IBM to own the New York Times, most of the women's clothing retailers in the USA and all the publishing houses.

Josh Marshall: >My Reaction: Three Cheers for Jeff Bezos: I’ll say it: let’s celebrate Jeff Bezos purchase of the Washington Post. Before going further let me acknowledge the potential downsides…. We’ll have to watch and wait to see…. That said, for years the Post was effectively subsidized by th...

You are exceptional! Wow! No one dares to voice this, though it is true:
"There is no known genetic mechanism that would fatten the tails at both ends. You might be tempted to think about something like autism together with the ideas that there are some very smart "autistic like" individuals and the fact that autism is more common in men. But autism is a devastating syndrome that is almost entirely associated with low cognitive ability. Really smart but socially inept individuals aren't actually autistic in any clinical sense."
That is doubly clever. First, you nicely dissected Larry Summers' foible vis a vis women's cognitive skills with respect to mathematics, engineering and the sciences.
Secondly, you dared to say what no one will, anywhere now: that really smart but socially inept individuals aren't actually autistic in any clinical sense.
If they were, perhaps Larry Summers is....?

Ezra Klein writes: >The case for Larry Summers: There’s a problem with reporting on the Fed chair race: Janet Yellen’s supporters will talk on the record. Larry Summers’s supporters, by and large, won’t. That’s in part because his key supporters are concentrated in and around the Obama administra...

Andrew, yes, it very peculiar how that crucial piece of information has been left out of the conversation! It is studiously avoided, or so it seems to me.
Larry Summers is very bright, but I suspect he is a trader-wannabe. He trashed Harvard's endowment taking a massive position against rising interest rates just prior to, well, rising. Larry Summers and at least two others have been like a revolving door between one particular hedge fund and the White House. And that particular hedge fund is the same one that has a strong continuing affinity with the world's largest e-commerce company who has just purchased the Washington Post, and is already receiving lots of government contracts.
Yellen doesn't have those sort of (in this case, unfortunate) connections. I don't think President Obama truly needs another loud bossy person (Larry Summers) to deal with. He has just been freed of Mrs. Clinton.
If we could submit write-in candidates, I would recommend a job sharing arrangement between Paul Volcker and Yellen, or perhaps Professor Bradford DeLong. Paul Volcker could lead at first, and after a year or two, or if he died (whichever were first), Professor DeLong could take over. He would have had on-the-job training from one of the best, and he is the consummate non-insider, out there in Berkeley, or so I hope ;o) as he seems trustworthy.

Ezra Klein writes: >The case for Larry Summers: There’s a problem with reporting on the Fed chair race: Janet Yellen’s supporters will talk on the record. Larry Summers’s supporters, by and large, won’t. That’s in part because his key supporters are concentrated in and around the Obama administra...

Where is Professor DeLong's Komment Krew? They should be out en masse by now.
Since you (sort of) asked: I am uncertain why the Washington Post staff is so glum. There isn't much reason to believe that Jeff Bezos, who is very bright but knows nothing about journalism, will be able to solve WaPo's problems. Many others have already tried, and failed, to address the news media malaise in our no-longer-so-wonderful world of technology. WaPo staff (please forgive that odious abbreviation) have little to look forward to, as Jeff Bezos "experiments" with one of the last bastions of our third-party independent press.
Next, as to why I am glum. It is pathetic that WaPo is valued at a mere $250 million. That isn't Jeff Bezos's fault, nor do I think he bargained down the Graham family when they agreed on the deal at the Aspen Institute conference. Pulse, a very lame app with minimal functionality, was purchased for $90 million by LinkedIn as a social news aggregator (not social news, real news, shared socially... roll eyes upward). There won't be news that anyone wants to read on Pulse if there's no WaPo or NY Times.
Jeff Bezos is majority shareholder in AWZN. The Department of Defense (CIA) and NASA have chosen AWS for their multi-billion dollar cloud contracting, earlier this year. Amazon will be benefiting shortly from the Dept. of Justice's decision to penalize Apple and traditional publishers, so that they cannot be competitive in e-books for the next 5 years. Jeff Bezos is a strong advocate of CommonCore curriculum in the U.S.A., thus has major influence on education policy. What else? He bought an interest in Business Insider! No, more relevant, his company, Amazon, dominates ecommerce.
It is not a wholesome, risk-averse situation when one company has major influence, due to legitimate right of ownership, over national news media, retail, government contracting, publishing and public school education.
Convince me that I am wrong. Please. Tear my conjectures apart, and console me. I will thank you, as I don't want this to be true.

This is double-plus-ungood: yesterday the *Washington Post's* expected lifespan was less than a decade, and there was no way it could burn through more than $250M before being shut down. Today that budget constraint is gone, and Jeff Bezos is willing to pour money into the *Post* while he exper...

@Procopius I am of the same opinion, that Obama could be considered a conservative. I'm unsure whether Brooks considers "conservative" as centrist though. Yet I think it is likely that Brooks would repudiate the policy agenda of a centrist-verging-on-conservative Democrat, even if there were significant overlap with his own moderate though GOP-allied view.
That is sad in two ways, the first being that Republican-Democrat "antipathy-on-principal" has grown so vehement now. Second, it is sad, to me, that a moderate Republican might be no more conservative than President Obama, who was nominally (I thought) a liberal Democrat. Sigh...

@Adam,
Yes, Brooks' position is to be The Moderate Republican at the Times. That's a good point. Yet I am trying to understand your comment, which is not transparent to me. In particular, why you remarked that the situation is:
"sad as an indictment of the quality of our commentary"
As The Moderate Republican, Brooks shouldn't agree with Democrat President Obama, not consistently. However, in a healthy two-party system, there should be some overlap between a moderate Republican and a Democrat centrist president. That is why I qualified my prior sentence with "not consistently". Is the indictment sad because the current GOP is opposed to nearly anything that is a Democrat policy or goal, by virtue of its being a Democrat policy or goal, and only that? If so, then I understand your meaning.